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Dreamweaver Is Dying; Long Live Drupal!
Barence writes "Here's an interesting blog post by a designer who reckons Dreamweaver is dying. It's not Dreamweaver's fault, though. Nor is the problem Adobe and its development team — the last Dreamweaver CS4 version was the most impressive release in years. Moreover, although Microsoft Expression Web poses a far more credible threat than FrontPage could muster, Dreamweaver remains the best HTML/CSS page-based editor available. The real problem for Dreamweaver and for its users is that the nature of the web is changing dramatically."
I've never tried it, when I do web design I do it with Gimp, Vim and Firebug. And I think that combo works great!
How do Dreamweaver compare to Vim? Is it advanced enough to not fool users to use css styled text for strong expressions?
Drupal et al make life a whole lot easier when it comes to updating a website and adding content. But what about the design?
Unless you want to stick to the default Drupal (or insert CMS here) themes, you'll probably want to design your own CMS template so people get a unique feel for your website. You'll still need to fall back on your classic static web-design skills using programs like Dreamweaver (or notepad).
Dreamweaver isn't dying, it's just falling into a more specialized category now. If you just used Dreamweaver as a way to update content, then you were really failing to use the program to it's full potential.
It's true, and Dreamweaver's autocomplete is fantastic.
I don't think there is much place for the GUI in template design, but the text editor in Dreamweaver is worth the money if you are a designer at a lower skill level.
Considering one would need the other apps in the suite, keeping Dreamweaver will be a perk.
Adobe should focus on making it a full fledged AMP (and others really) testing environment and it would be potent.
Easy local testing, their sitemanager to sync with remote, fantastic text editor, and maybe even some integration for template previewing (maybe they do?). I personally only use it to help be remember the names of various CSS properties and what they can be set too, but there is definitely potential to make designers more comfortable with interfacing with the server, as they have tied to do from the start (and I hate).
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Yes, the reasons for using each are very different. If your site is dynamic, Drupal is great. If your site is static, Dreamweaver is a really good tool. While it may seem that more and more sites are becoming dynamic, I'd argue that there are still -- and will always remain -- a very large number of static sites cared for by single developers that have no need of a CMS.
I know it's popular here to bash wysiwig editors (just write the code, dammit!), but Dreamweaver has gotten MUCH better since version 4.
It's code is good, it works well with Flash, CSS and JavaScript. And if you're a designer, the Photoshop integration is pretty fantastic. Personally, I use Dreamweaver primarily for the site management tools, which are also very good.
If you haven't used DW in the past 4 years, then you haven't used DW.
Agreed.
The great majority of what I do are PHP based homegrown CMS type sites. I use Dreamweaver to manage the code, I use Photoshop and Illustrator for the graphics, and I use Firebug to figure out the CSS.
I don't use Dreamweaver to it's fullest potential because I no longer do a lot of static HTML stuff, but I still find Dreamweaver useful for PHP, JavaScript and CSS coding, probably because I've been using it for 6 years.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
Fun? You must be joking. I've worked a lot with Sharepoint Designer and it's the most ungodly abomination of a software package I've ever had to touch. It makes the rest of Microsoft's applications look like they were made by NASA.
The whole of Sharepoint is gargantuan mess, from the half implemented API to the ridiculous, overcomplicated, undocumented deployment procedures (restarting the webserver every time you change code, really?), to the insane use of tables in the HTML (have a look at the html on an average system page, and see if your mind can deal with five or six tables wrapped around every single design element).
Sharepoint Designer is where you can really see Sharepoint for what it is. It has all these features that sound very nice, until you try to save an .aspx page and it replicates your previous change somewhere rather than the one you were currently checking in. You think "huh that's weird", delete, the extra code, rewrite the code you wanted to add, and check in again, and now the previous change appears three times. In the end the only solution is to delete the page and the associated content types from the site and create it again (and any pages that used it). That's the sort of wonderful behavior you can expect from Sharepoint Designer.
I've never used the WYSIWYG editor because, frankly, I'm scared.
... so I can neglect to send flowers.
For too long, too many self-described "web designers" have relied on Dreamweaver and its ilk to do their jobs for them. These people are not "web designers", they are graphic designers who think web documents are a blank canvas to be painted on, such as when they open a new file in Photoshop or Illustrator. The web is not a 3-panel brochure.
This delusion is fostered by their uninformed clients and bosses who only consider what looks good and how fast (cheap) it is produced. Little explicit attention is paid to usability, readability, or accessibility.
Good riddance, I say. The day these monkeys no longer have a crutch can not come soon enough.
Dreamweaver attempts to do the WYSIWYG which is geared towards those people who don't really know how to code.
DW has its place due to site management and debugging tools, and it doesn't force the wysiwyg. When I use it, it's usually with the mixed text/graphical view, because it is faster to zero in on certain parts of the code graphically by clicking there, then switching to the code pane.
Essentially, it's much faster to scan a picture than text, even if your markup is tidy, and it is nice to see the less-frequent available parameters for CSS in a pane rather than pull all of them from memory. DW's code has improved quite a bit over the years, too, it isn't the ugly mess it once was.
Damn those pesky terrorists
This is not news.
Modern Web-CMSes and feasable CSS made DW design capabilities and it's offline templating system completely superflous somewhere back in 2002 or 2003. In fact, I posted very much the same analysis on this issue about 5 or 6 years ago here on slashdot. Whatever is left of DW is here to stay for those doing the actuall screen/HTML design. The rext of us uses CSS frameworks and foundation templates and simply replaces the GFX and/or the colorcodes. I haven't used DW longer than 5 minutes since back in 2001.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
A designer might need Dreamweaver
Anyone doing design (artwork rather than page layout) isn't going to use Dreamweaver. It's great as a WYSIWYG html editor. From a design standpoint, it doesn't do much else. No raster or vector creation (unless you've decided to try the Celik CSS polygon method).
The only people I know who still use it are coders who find the extra features it provides in terms of editing and site management useful. In this sense, the article is quite correct -- Drupal and Wordpress and other software are eating away at the market that used to see Dreamweaver as the option for editing webpages without knowing HTML. Now CMSs do that.
Given that Dreamweaver really isn't a design tool either, usefulness as an IDE is pretty much the last thing Dreamweaver really has going for it.
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